Archive for the 'Miscellaneous' Category

I don’t know why she objects, it’s far from the dull experience I had
when I was her age. We check out the confessionals at the back of
the church and look at all the statues “Look, Mummy, baby Jesus.
Oh Mummy, another baby Jesus”. You get the picture.
Incidentally, I am having some difficulty explaining the role of
Joseph in the holy family, for the meanwhile he has been described as
Jesus’s Daddy which may yet get me excommunicated.

Looking at the pieta which features a rather grisly looking Jesus we had the following exchange.
Her: Oh Mummy, poor sick Jesus.
Me: Yes dear.
Her: And his Mummy Mary is sad.
Me: Yes she is, poor Mary.
Her: As sad as Cinderella?
Me: Possibly even sadder.
Her: We give her a biscuit to make it better.
Me: She is so sad that even a biscuit may not make it better.

Good for the Princess, tackling the tough topics. My little one is terrified of the priests, which makes eucharist very complicated. last time, as the wizened hand reached forward to bless her, she backed up, stepped off the kneeling bit at the altar rail and fell smack on her diapered bottom. Oh, the screams. Mommy didn’t take communion that day, she was busy rushing the screaming devil-child away from the source of righteousness.

Good for the Princess, tackling the tough topics. My little one is terrified of the priests, which makes eucharist very complicated. last time, as the wizened hand reached forward to bless her, she backed up, stepped off the kneeling bit at the altar rail and fell smack on her diapered bottom. Oh, the screams. Mommy didn’t take communion that day, she was busy rushing the screaming devil-child away from the source of righteousness.

The
Princess is obsessed with Cinderella. We
have seen the pantomime, the puppet show, the film and we are in possession of
a number of variations of the book.

Last night
Mr. Waffle put her to bed and he told me that she did her latest trick inspired
by the magic of the fairy godmother.
Â“PhtumÂ” she said waving an imaginary wand Â“you are Princess and I am
Daddy.Â” Â“What did you do?Â” I asked. Â“What do you think I did?Â” he said Â“I lay on
her bed while she sat in the chair beside me and told me the story of
Cinderella.

The boys
were christened. Rejoice. Mr. Waffle got two blankets from Marks and
Spencer to serve as spotless garments. By
the time we got to the church, one of them had been trailed in the mud. Alas.
The boys were very virtuous and slept and were therefore left in the
hall. In fact the poor mites spent a lot
of Christmas sleeping in halls.

As promised
earlier, please admire photograph of me breastfeeding twins and maintaining a
semblance of decency. Yes, I know you
were all desperate to see that.

The Princess
eats eggs. My parents-in-law are the
proud possessors of one egg cup. One day it went missing. My mother-in-law said Â“donÂ’t worry, you know
what makes a great egg cup? A toilet
rollÂ”. She scurried off to the bathroom
to get a roll of toilet paper. I said
defiantly Â“I am not feeding my daughter an egg from a roll of toilet paperÂ”. Â“But
itÂ’s a fresh rollÂ” she said. The
Princess started to wail. I conceded
defeat and gave her the egg from the roll of toilet paper. It works perfectly. I said to my mother-in-law Â“IÂ’m almost afraid
to ask but how do you know this?Â”. Â“WellÂ”
she said Â“when I was an airhostess in the 60s and we went to New York overnight, you would get a breakfast
allowance. We wanted to save the money,
so we would buy eggs and boil them in the hotel kettle and eat them from the roll
of toilet paper.Â” That woman is
determined to ruin my vision of the glamour of the glory days of aviation.

All of life is, in a sense, about one of two blankets trailing in the mud. ðŸ˜‰Lovely pics: I particularly like the one where Cha is sleeping among the wine bottles…

0
Sweetie(s) given

Friar Tuck

on 09 January 2006 at 16:07

After drinking all that wine, it is no wonder that they were snockered!Great pics though. Your breastfeeding pic is even decent enough to be shown in America. It was surely a disappointment to the NSA folks, who, I am sure, have set a filter to find all references to ‘breastfeeding’ passing through the air.Ha ha. Just kidding. I’m sure they are only looking for terrorists. No, really. I love America. I love G.W. Bush. Please don’t arrest me.

“Unbelievable
as it may now sound, that keyboard layout [QWERTY] was designed in 1873 as a
feat of anti-engineering. It employs a
whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as
possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and
concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use
their weaker hand). The reason behind
all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of
1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers
had to slow down typists. When
improvement in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932
with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our
typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched
by then. The vested interests of
hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and
computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard
efficiency for over 60 years.”

Comments

Friar Tuck

on 16 December 2005 at 18:36

At one time, you could buy Dvorak computer keyboards, which arranged the keys in the (supposedly) most efficient layout. I have not seen them advertised in ages, however.

Of such absurdities are our worlds constructed. Of course the French decided to use the AZERTY layout, which is actually no better at all for typing French, but makes the point that at least it is NOT ENGLISH, which is the main thing for the Anglophobe French. “Ordinateur Individuelle” forsooth!

Ha! I remember hearing something like that once. In my world, I have typed so much that I’ve rubbed all the letters off the keyboard of my iBook G4 since I got it in February 2004, so I no longer can tell where the letters actually are… I have to rely on the memory in my fingertips. One day I’ll get around to fixing it but for now it looks kind of cool to have a computer with a mostly blank keyboard!